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The purpose of this paper is to establish an integrated framework of the antecedents of enforcement after contract violations in construction projects and to examine whether contract provisions (control and coordination provisions) and trust (goodwill and competence trust) affect enforcement mechanisms (contractual enforcement and relational enforcement).

A survey method was employed to test the hypotheses. The authors collected data from the Chinese construction industry, and general contractor respondents were asked to answer a questionnaire about a contract violation by one of their subcontractors.

Control provisions and competence trust are positively related to contractual enforcement, but goodwill trust is negatively related to contractual enforcement. Relational enforcement is influenced by goodwill trust and competence trust.

This study treats contract violations as a given variable, and it focuses on contract violations by subcontractors. The cross-sectional design makes it difficult to confirm the causality of the relationships.

Overly strict contractual enforcement can generate disputes and a vicious cycle of retaliation, and overly severe relational enforcement can damage a potentially profitable long-term relationship. In construction projects, the violating party will benefit from this study to avoid excessively contractual enforcement and relational enforcement, thus developing a more collaborative atmosphere on the current project and even establishing a solid long-term relationship.

This study extends the project management literature by investigating the antecedents of enforcement after contract violations, an area not yet fully researched.

Outsourcing is a common practice that is often adopted to reduce costs and enhance capabilities. The underlying logic of a firm's outsourcing strategy is not always evident due to multiple antecedents with interacting effects. This study identifies critical factors that influence outsourcing strategies and reveals their interactions with empirical evidence from Chinese construction firms.

The quantitative decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method was applied to analyze the interrelationships among the antecedents of project outsourcing strategies. First, 24 experts from 13 Chinese construction firms were invited to evaluate and score the influence of each factor on the other. Second, the graph theory and matrix tools of DEMATEL were used to quantitatively obtain the causality among factors and the prominence of each factor within the system.

Among the antecedents, a firm's pursuit of cost efficiency, identity, technological capability and contracting capability are the most prominent factors influencing project outsourcing strategies. For the interactions among these factors, this study reveals that the focal firm's technological capability significantly influences its contracting capability, and they jointly influence the firm's outsourcing practices, the selection of outsourcing vendors and, eventually, its pursuit of cost efficiency. Moreover, legal restrictions in the institutional environment strongly shape this capability–cost efficiency relationship.

Twelve critical factors following different theoretical perspectives at varying levels of analysis were identified from the literature review. By revealing the interrelationships among these factors, this study develops a holistic framework that integrates the transaction cost and capability perspectives for understanding project outsourcing strategies embedded in different institutional environments.

Chinese construction projects commonly implement subcontracting, but organizational arrangements have received little attention. Some studies have debated the impact of firm capabilities on subcontracting. To address these issues, this study differentiates the general contractor’s technological capabilities and alliance management capabilities and investigates how capabilities affect the degree of subcontracting and subcontracting dispersion based on the resource-based view and transaction cost economics.

By conducting a survey, 219 valid questionnaires were collected from Chinese construction companies. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to test the influence of capabilities on subcontracting organizational arrangements and the moderating role of uncertainty.

The results show that technological capabilities decrease the degree of subcontracting, whereas alliance management capabilities increase the degree of subcontracting as well as subcontracting dispersion. The results also indicate that the positive effects of alliance management capabilities are weakened by project uncertainty.

This study provides a better understanding of the diversity of subcontracting organizational arrangements in China. In addition, the findings may help general contractors carry out a rational arrangement by considering their capabilities and transaction hazards.

This study contributes to a holistic understanding of how capabilities determine subcontracting by distinguishing technological capabilities and alliance management capabilities and refining the degree of subcontracting and subcontracting dispersion. Meanwhile, the findings highlight the complementarity of the resource-based view and transaction cost economics by examining the moderating effect of uncertainty.

Periodic inspection and maintenance are essential for effective pavement preservation. Cracks not only affect the appearance of the road and reduce the levelness, but also shorten the life of road. However, traditional road crack detection methods based on manual investigations and image processing are costly, inefficiency and unreliable. The research aims to replace the traditional road crack detection method and further improve the detection effect.

In this paper, a crack detection method based on matrix network fusing corner-based detection and segmentation network is proposed to effectively identify cracks. The method combines ResNet 152 with matrix network as the backbone network to achieve feature reuse of the crack. The crack region is identified by corners, and segmentation network is constructed to extract the crack. Finally, parameters such as the length and width of the cracks were calculated from the geometric characteristics of the cracks and the relative errors with the actual values were 4.23 and 6.98% respectively.

To improve the accuracy of crack detection, the model was optimized with the Adam algorithm and mixed with two publicly available datasets for model training and testing and compared with various methods. The results show that the detection performance of our method is better than many excellent algorithms, and the anti-interference ability is strong.

This paper proposed a new type of road crack detection method. The detection effect is better than a variety of detection algorithms and has strong anti-interference ability, which can completely replace traditional crack detection methods and meet engineering needs.

This paper aims to explain how contractual complexity, including contractual control, coordination and adaptation, makes a difference to the task and relationship conflict, and then, to investigate the moderating roles played by both, total interdependence and interdependence asymmetry, in altering the association between the two types of conflicts.

This study obtained data through a questionnaire survey in the Chinese construction industry and the final sample consisted of 232 responses. The data were analysed using hierarchy analysis using SPSS.

The results are as follows: first, higher contractual control and coordination reduce the level of relationship conflicts, and higher contractual coordination also reduces the level of task conflicts; second, task conflict positively affects relationship conflict; third, task conflict mediates the relationship between contractual coordination and relationship conflict; and finally, when total interdependence is higher, task conflict induces more relationship conflict. On the contrary, high interdependence asymmetry weakens the positive relationship between task and relationship conflicts.

This study highlights the importance of contracts in conflict management. The findings can guide practitioners in drafting suitable contracts to deal with task and relationship conflicts more effectively.

This study differentiates the effects of distinct components of contracts on task and relationship conflicts, and then reveals the contingent effects of interdependence on the relationship between task and relationship conflicts in inter-organisational transactions.

This study aims to first identify influencing factors of outsourcing decisions in construction projects systematically and further to unravel the interactions of these influencing factors from a holistic perspective.

This study concerns the design and analysis of two-stage studies, where, at the first stage, a systematic literature review and 48 semi-structured interviews with senior practitioners in construction firms were conducted to identify influencing factors in outsourcing decisions in construction projects. At the second stage, the decision-making and trial evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method was employed to explore the interactions between influencing factors and pathways of outsourcing decisions.

Three focuses for outsourcing decisions are outlined, revealing that outsourcing restrictions, strategic needs and cost objectives need to be considered in outsourcing decisions. In addition, the finding contributes to the integration of transaction costs perspective and capability perspective by unravelling the mechanism of how different factors work together.

This study outlines 18 influencing factors and three sequential focuses for outsourcing decision-making, providing a clearer understanding of each factor’s contribution for decision-makers.

Most of the existing studies stressed the net effect of individual outsourcing factors from a single logic and paid little attention to their complex causal relationship. This study develops a holistic perspective of the influencing factors of outsourcing in construction projects by contending the overall knowledge of outsourcing and analyzing the causal relationship between them.

This paper aims to introduce the history and major achievement of the Chinese private enterprise survey (CPES), which is one of the most enduring large-scale nationwide sample surveys in China, providing important micro firm-level data for understanding and studying the development of Chinese enterprises and entrepreneurs over the past 26 years.

The main body of this paper is based on a bibliometric analysis of all literature using CPES until 2017.

This paper discusses problems that users may encounter during data mining. By doing so, it can assist other researchers to get a better understanding of what has been done (e.g. journals, topics, scholars and institutions) and do their research in a more targeted way.

As members of the survey project team, the authors also take a prospect of the future data design and use, as well as offer some suggestions about how to use the CPES data to improve high-quality development and business environment evaluation in China.

This paper is the first to provide an overall picture of academic papers in China and abroad that have used the CPES data.

This study examines how creditor interventions after debt covenant violations affect corporate tax avoidance. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that creditor interventions increase borrowers' tax avoidance. This effect is concentrated among firms with weaker shareholder governance before creditor interventions and among those with less bargaining power during subsequent debt renegotiations. Our results indicate that creditors play an active role in shaping corporate tax policy outside of bankruptcy.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the research of construction conflict from 1991 to 2020 and propose research directions for future scholarly work. During the recent decades, it is widely accepted that construction conflict is inevitable, and conflict management has become an important component of project management. However, few works were done to map the global study in this field, there is limited review that evaluates the current stage of construction conflict research.

This study adopted a holistic literature review approach that incorporates bibliometric search and scientometric analysis. A total of 698 bibliographic records from the Web of Science core collection database were collected for the scientometric analysis. CiteSpace5.7 was adopted for the science mapping purpose in this study.

Through co-authorship analysis, co-word analysis and co-citation analysis, influential scholars and journals are identified. Several research trends are highlighted according to the scientometric analyses of the construction conflict topics. For example, the application of simulation and algorithms to the study of construction conflict management systems.

Construction is a resource-intensive, multi-participant and multi-targeted industry. Conflicts always exist in the whole life cycle of construction projects, it is important for industry practitioners to be updated of the latest movement and progress of the academic research.

This study contributed to the body of knowledge in construction conflict and bridge the research gap in the thorough review of previous research work.

This study aims to identify and classify the range of antecedents of counterproductive knowledge behavior (CKB) to provide a better understanding of their implications for addressing CKB.

The study includes three studies. Using meta-analysis (Study 1) and meta-synthesis (Study 2), the authors reviewed extant primary quantitative and qualitative studies to aggregate information on the antecedents of CKB identified to date. In Study 3, these antecedents were modeled schematically by using the matrix of cross-impact multiplications (MICMAC) analysis.

The meta-analysis and meta-synthesis (Studies 1 and 2) yielded 28 antecedents of CKB. These were categorized into five groups of characteristics, relating to the workplace, leadership, interpersonal, individual differences and knowledge. Then, in Study 3, the antecedents were categorized according to their interrelatedness and strength of effects (using four quadrants comprising autonomous, dependence, driving and linkage factors).

This study takes an integrative approach to the CKB literature, both by aggregating underlying constructs (knowledge hoarding, hiding, etc.) and in aggregating quantitative and qualitative literature. This prevents silos and integrates knowledge across a range of CKB studies. Besides, the authors reveal the relative role of antecedents by modeling them.